20.8.17

A Film a Week - Directions / Posoki

Some
say the best way to get to know some country is travelling
its roads. The same goes with cities and streets, preferably by
walking, but driving or being driven also helps. And here we are on
the territory of cabbies and their stories
and anecdotes: Stephan Komandarev’sDirections examines Sofia and Bulgarian society in general
through the series of kinda-sorta connected short stories from the
taxi rides.

The
first one starts as a family piece, a nervous, stressed small
entrepreneur father drives his daughter to school, giving orders and
instructions to his workers over the phone, then turns into socially
aware farce when the girl goes out and high school-age prostitute
gets in, just to end as a tragedy when that cabbie-entrepreneur is
confronted with the banker who tries to squeeze him for bribe. “We
make the laws for us, not for you”, the banker says and sets the
mood of the film: a country completing the transition to capitalism,
corruption, erosion of the values, gaping class divide, the whole
nine yards. That story, the only one set and shot in daytime, will be
just some news over the radio in the others, with citizens commenting
and sympathizing with the taxi driver taking the justice in his own
hands.

In
the ones that follow, we will see a medley of short stories. A
surgeon goes to work in his Sofia hospital for the last time before
moving to Germany, opening the subject of leaving “the country of
optimists (because all the pessimists and realists have already
left)”. A melancholic young driver saves a philosophy teacher in
debt from suicide. A lawyer gets in trouble for exposing his driver
as a cheater. And so on, and so on.

“Cab
stories” are not that new in cinema. Let us just remember
Jarmusch’s modern classic Night on Earth and the
stories happening around the same time in big cities from Los Angeles
to Helsinki. It was a bit uneven, as all “short story collections”
are, but it was well done, cool and soulful. The problem with
Directions is not that it is uneven, it is, and its stories
vary in length and mood, but the fact that Jarmusch’s Earth is
reduced to one very particular city with its particular problems that
are staple diet of East European cinema.

Komandarev’s
film has its moments, there is some ingenuity and gentleness and
definitely there is some heart and even humour. But how far can you
go hitting all the same tones of corruption, capitalism, crime,
class, especially in the form of short. With a more thorough
selection of the material that would or would not get in the final
version, better character development and focus on more personal,
quieter moments and universal topics, Directions would be a
better film. But the spotlight on the socio-political context makes
it more of a statement.